We have not only entered “The Age of AI,” we have entered the Age of “AI Bots” and “AI Personas.” There is not (yet) an English WikiPedia article for “AI persona,” but this is the definition Gemini AI provided to me this evening:
An AI persona is a carefully crafted digital profile with a specific personality, expertise, tone, and style. The concept of “AI persona” is used in several contexts, including marketing, workflow automation, and digital companionship. Unlike a general-purpose AI, a persona can be trained on specific data to serve a specialized function. (reference articles 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5)
Dina Temple-Raston and Erika Gajda’s September 19, 2025 podcast episode, “The GoLaxy papers: Inside China’s AI persona army,” highlights a variety of important and alarming issues relating to artificial intelligence, but chief among these is the way Chinese government entities continue to “hoover up” terabytes of public data about individuals in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States, as well as China, and build CUSTOMIZED “AI personas” which:
- can be deployed in influence campaigns / psychological operations
- can be “micro-targeted” at specific individuals
- are being developed at breakneck speeds
- are (at least at this point) virtually impossible to detect and identify as non-human / AI-based.
These are big problems we are ill-equipped to handle at this point.
Compare the challenges posed by micro-targeted and almost-impossible-to-identify “AI personas” with common “AI slop” reels / videos like this one below I saw on Facebook yesterday morning. In the video, a young girl who appears to be tending a small flock of goats takes a stick and strikes a wolf, who is apparently attacking a goat. Although I haven’t independently confirmed this, I’m 99% this is an AI generated video. It’s labeled on Facebook, “girl save a goat from wolfbite,” and the wolf appears to almost be “necking” the goat instead of biting it before the girl hits it on the head with a stick.
“AI slop” does have a current English WikiPedia page, and its authors explain:
“AI slop,” often simply “slop,” is a term for low-quality media made with generative artificial intelligence. It is characterized by an inherent lack of effort and is currently being generated at an overwhelming volume. Coined in the 2020s, the term has a pejorative connotation similar to “spam.”
AI slop has been variously defined as “digital clutter,” “filler content [prioritizing] speed and quantity over substance and quality,” and “shoddy or unwanted AI content in social media, art, books and search results.”
Both “AI slop” and “AI personas” are and promise to further pollute our information environment, but also make it increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction. Based on the transcript of this article, I asked ChatGPT 5 to provide a definition of “AI persona,” and this is what it provided to me:
An AI persona is a highly realistic, AI-generated digital double: an online identity crafted from scraped personal and behavioral data, animated by generative AI to interact, adapt, and persuade like a real person. Unlike crude bots that recycle slogans, AI personas listen, respond in natural language, and tailor their tone and messaging to specific individuals or groups. This makes them powerful tools for influence operations, capable of slipping into social feeds, building trust, and subtly shaping narratives at scale.
If you are not having conversations with others in your family, circle of friends, and colleagues about AI chatbots, you need to be. In February 2025, I facilitated a webinar for the Media Education Lab on “AI Chatbot Ethics” which touched on some of these issues. The archived webinar post also includes links to a variety of articles, videos and podcasts related to AI chatbots which are both informative and useful to catalyze these conversations.
Media literacy IS literacy today. Check out my growing collection of media literacy links and resources on medialiteracy.wesfryer.com. Also consider subscribing to my periodic (almost monthly) free Substack newsletter, “Media Literacy with Wes.”
Give the “The GoLaxy papers” podcast episode a listen. The Age of AI is just getting started.
Shout out to Brian Turnbaugh for sharing this podcast episode link with me.